Tech Rebels

On the occasion of Ars Technica's 15th anniversary, we decided to bring you a series of articles on the most disruptive companies, technologies, and people we've covered in our time on the Internet since June 1998. We begin with the tales of three companies—Amazon, Twitter, and SpaceX—that rebelled against the established order and changed technology for the better.

While Amazon dominated online retail and practically invented what we now call cloud computing, Twitter took advantage of the open Internet to create the most free-wheeling social network and become a tool for social change. SpaceX, meanwhile, has shown us that we may end up looking toward private industry—rather than NASA—to take humans deeper into space.

We'll soon shift to the most disruptive technologies and people of Ars' 15 years, but today's focus is all on the companies that became tech rebels. Let's head back to the mid-'90s and start with the elder statesmen here: Amazon.

Reinventing retail and inventing the “cloud”

In July of 1995, one year after Amazon was incorporated, the company sold its first book: Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

So began the inexorable rise of a company that would show the world what "Internet-scale" really means. Amazon has had an incredible impact on the purchasing habits of consumers, making it easy to get almost any kind of product for a reasonable price while helping people who visit brick-and-mortar retail stores become more savvy shoppers. I hardly ever buy anything in a physical store without first whipping out my phone, checking the price on Amazon, and (just as importantly) reading customer reviews to find out if the product is worth buying at all.

Despite getting its start in the distribution of physical goods, Amazon impressed by anticipating the shift toward digital products. Amazon debuted the Kindle in 2007 before most people realized they would want to read electronic books on a handheld device. Today, Amazon is one of the biggest sellers of not only e-books but digital music and video as well. Consumers who don't own any Amazon devices and those who have either a Kindle e-reader or Kindle Fire tablet all take advantage of this online marketplace.

Over the years, Amazon built one of the most extensive and efficient networks of data centers in the world. Obviously, this was necessary to support one of the Internet's most highly visited websites and to manage goods and shipping at its many retail centers. Amazon became one of the most effective technology vendors on the planet, but for a long time it had only one customer—itself. So instead of keeping all its technology advantages in-house, the company unveiled Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006. This allowed anyone with a credit card to access Amazon's massive and highly efficient IT infrastructure.

The advent of AWS (and, in particular, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) was the key moment in the business world's ongoing shift from physical servers operated on-premises to virtual computing resources accessed via the "cloud." Amazon helped IT customers rebel against traditional hardware vendors by letting them buy only as much computing horsepower as they need, when they need it, instead of stocking up on servers and storage with the risk of under- or over-buying. Need a supercomputer, but only a few times a year? Use Amazon.

An entire generation of businesses is being built on top of Amazon's servers. Amazon frees these companies from having to build their own physical data centers, letting each user of Amazon bring value to the market by creating innovative software. Witness Dropbox, an online storage company that makes it easy for tens of millions of consumers to sync data across all of their devices. Dropbox doesn't store any of its customers' data on its own servers. Instead, Dropbox uses Amazon's Simple Storage Service. Outages at Amazon can disrupt many websites because of AWS's ubiquity, but the Amazon cloud's overall impact has surely been a net positive.

It’s so… easy… to buy!

To get some more thoughts on how Amazon has changed people's lives, we polled the Ars staff:

Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson:

Amazon—specifically Amazon Prime—has totally destroyed my sense of propriety in what should and shouldn't be shipped through UPS and how much shipping is supposed to cost. Dried goods? Buy it from Amazon, get it in two days. Furniture? Buy it from Amazon, get it in two days. Kitchen utensils? Amazon, two days. 300 lbs of home theater gear? Amazon. Two days. I doubt I'll enter a brick and mortar store ever again unless I have to. The instant Amazon starts offering groceries in my area, I'll shift over to that and I'll literally never have to leave the house to shop for anything.

Amazon to me is less of a tech rebel and more of a financial rebel.

Disruptive? It's downright life-changing. It's obviously not Amazon providing the mechanism of transport—the "disruptiveness" of it all would be impossible without the underlying massive system of UPS and FedEx in place—but, man, once I quit having to worry about $10 here for shipping and $15 there... well, let's just say that Amazon has provided a ridiculously high percentage of my physical goods in the past couple years.

Associate Writer Casey Johnston:

Amazon has done more than any company to bridge the gap between online shopping and regular retail shopping. Amazon Prime is my favorite feature of theirs—it makes acquiring stuff I need, even grocery-type things, very, very low-effort. I suppose the ability to get stuff quickly would be marginally less useful if I didn't have the reviews to give me a rough idea of how good it is. But the fact that I can get something and send it back within a week if I don't like it, pretty much from my own home, is massively convenient.

Senior Science Editor John Timmer:

Amazon to me is less of a tech rebel and more of a financial rebel. The company just keeps things profitable enough so that nobody panics, then uses the relative freedom that allows to build market share, buy competitors, etc. And it's aggressively moved into electronic retailing and built a device/content ecosystem. The idea for a while was that, at any time it wants, it could tweak everything slightly and the profits would just start pouring in. But it's been years, and the company doesn't seem to be interested in doing that.

Managing Editor Eric Bangeman

One way Amazon has been a rebel, especially as a publicly traded company, is its relentless determination to grow and expand its reach at the expense of profits. If I were a shareholder, I'd like to see bigger profits, a higher stock price, and dividends. But Amazon has really been focused on making the customer experience better and finding ways to monetize consumers' desires for ever more convenience. If someone would have told me 10 years ago I'd happily pay $75 a year to get free shipping on products, I would have been skeptical. Now I'm a dedicated Amazon Prime customer who thinks nothing about ordering razor blades and AA batteries even though I could walk to the Walgreens three blocks away and get them there.

Security Editor Dan Goodin:

I buy 10 or 20 albums per year through the service. I probably buy two to four gifts for out-of-town family members per year. But I still like and support local merchants, and I'm not a big fan of using credit cards, either. So I still use brick-and-mortar stores for the vast majority of my purchases. I've never used any of Amazon's cloud services. Too bad, because I hear they're great.

Senior Business Editor Cyrus Farivar:

Amazon Prime is pretty flipping great. Flat-rate shipping without having to think about it! Yes! I've never used their TV offerings, even though I get them included.

Amazon "trained its investors" not to expect huge profits, and its stock price has kept rising. Slate business and economics writer Matthew Yglesias humorously observed that "Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers."

Amazon may not be able to avoid high profit margins forever. Even if Amazon keeps operating its retail business at near-break-even margins, Amazon Web Services is believed to be a $2 billion-dollar-a-year revenue generator. Morgan Stanley research predicts it will expand to $24 billion by 2022.

Competitors in the IT industry are worried. Executives at EMC-owned VMware have expressed dismay at the challenge posed by "a company that sells books." But Amazon stopped being just a bookseller many years ago, and most of us can be thankful for that.

I certainly agree about Amazon's disruptive nature and the trickle-down through their competitors. Being able to find almost anything and get it delivered easily is pretty much up there with the Jetsons.

It's definitely been a crazy ride, and while things change, I'm glad I've been a reader since (close to) the beginning.

I know I'm old and all that but what's so new about what Amazon does except it uses webpages? My mother was ordering from catalogs decades ago and stuff showed up at home then too regardless of weight or size AND you could send it back.

Twitter? Not interested, signal to noise ratio is way, way too high.

SpaceX I will agree on, now that's something worthy of being included.

The other thing about Amazon is that almost everything that makes it great comes marked with a great big asterisk marked US only. Amazon as a storefront is quite shit outside of the US. It was only around the release of the Kindle Paperwhite that I as a Canadian could buy Kindle eBooks without having to fake a US address, yet they sold and advertised the Kindle in Canada. Several Canadian Arsians have said that they don't recall having to do this (and no doubt more will again tell me this), and I would tell them to check the country settings on their account. I also had Amazon support tell me I could not buy eBooks in Canada as well as an email that essentially said "hey, you have a US address on file, but you're in Canada. You shouldn't be buying books from us".

When Amazon Prime for Canada was announced, there was a great big "meh" from Canadians commenting on those articles. Still not worth it.

Grocery shopping? Digital media? Most stuff sold by Amazon itself? Not outside of the US. Amazon is very much an American success story.

I know I'm old and all that but what's so new about what Amazon does except it uses webpages? My mother was ordering from catalogs decades ago and stuff showed up at home then too regardless of weight or size AND you could send it back.

Maybe when Amazon first started, but to look at them as simply as a "catalog" is a bit myopic. They are (at least) a hardware manufacturer* and IT services provider as well.

*Insofar as they develop the Kindle line, but don't necessarily build it.

Amazon owns my wallet. We have had this arrangement for many years now. I am not displeased with the results. Though my wallet still gets angry from time to time.

Amazon is incredible. I used to think Ebay was where it was at. But Amazon completely took over that territory. A single unified storefront. Easy to find. And it sells just about everything. Computer games, books, movies, music, dental tools, paintball gear, a wind breaker, and a rubber knife. Just a small sampling of what you can purchase. And if Amazon doesn't have it, their third party sellers will.

I know I'm old and all that but what's so new about what Amazon does except it uses webpages? My mother was ordering from catalogs decades ago and stuff showed up at home then too regardless of weight or size AND you could send it back.

Maybe when Amazon first started, but to look at them as simply as a "catalog" is a bit myopic. They are (at least) a hardware manufacturer* and IT services provider as well.

*Insofar as they develop the Kindle line, but don't necessarily build it.

I dont look at them that way but all the editor comments focused on the "mail order" side rather than anything else, I just found it comical

I think what has really propelled Twitter is that journalists and bloggers love it. They are constantly talking about it, quoting it, posting giant images of tweets that really could and should be confined to 140 characters of plaintext.

In essence, journalists and bloggers became Twitter's advertisers and cheerleaders, because it makes their jobs so much easier (although potentially also more shallow). Those giant tweet images are often bigger than banner ads and more centrally placed within the content.

Whereas from a user perspective, personally I find Twitter essentially useless because even when someone says something important, it's largely without background detail or context (and certainly without any evidence of fact-checking).

Twitter is nothing special. Changed the world? They didn't even innovate. Technologically, sending short digital messages was extremely old hat. All Twitter really did was market a branded service based around an old idea. It's really a shame the idea of mass instant messaging gravitated to them, rather than a decentralized open-standards protocol that belongs to the Internet instead of a company. I guess it was a commentary on the changing demographics of the Internet, that the new class of users needed something with a friendly/familiar (corporate branding) face, and this was permitted to snowball. I'll be happy to see that flash in the pan burn out, along with facebook.

I know I'm old and all that but what's so new about what Amazon does except it uses webpages? My mother was ordering from catalogs decades ago and stuff showed up at home then too regardless of weight or size AND you could send it back.

Webpages has proved to be a sort of big deal. Some thanks go to Amazon for that.

Twitter is nothing special. Changed the world? They didn't even innovate. Technologically, sending short digital messages was extremely old hat. All Twitter really did was market a branded service based around an old idea. It's really a shame the idea of mass instant messaging gravitated to them, rather than a decentralized open-standards protocol that belongs to the Internet instead of a company. I guess it was a commentary on the changing demographics of the Internet, that the new class of users needed something with a friendly/familiar (corporate branding) face, and this was permitted to snowball. I'll be happy to see that flash in the pan burn out, along with facebook.

The thing about both Twitter and Facebook has little to do with the technology, but rather how it speaks to people and how people use it. Technology and how people use it go hand in hand. iPhone vs old Palm/Windows Mobile is one example (not a perfect simile but it sort of works).

I love Amazon. But as a Swiss citizen it has quite a few shortcomings, although many of them are not Amazon's fault.

They don't deliver Hardware over the German border (there's no "Swiss" Amazon, we have to use the German one) and a lot of products are not available in Europe. But both of these things are more of a regulation thing than anything else.

What does annoy me though is the fact that not all English books are available for my Kindle. I wanted to start the Thrawn series from the Star Wars EU but could only find the German version in the German Amazon, despite there also being an English version in the US shop.So I'll have to dig through Young Wizards and the new Dresden Files book (that hopefully comes out soon) and hope that the English version of books will be made available.

I love Amazon. But as a Swiss citizen it has quite a few shortcomings, although many of them are not Amazon's fault.

They don't deliver Hardware over the German border (there's no "Swiss" Amazon, we have to use the German one) and a lot of products are not available in Europe. But both of these things are more of a regulation thing than anything else.

What does annoy me though is the fact that not all English books are available for my Kindle. I wanted to start the Thrawn series from the Star Wars EU but could only find the German version in the German Amazon, despite there also being an English version in the US shop.So I'll have to dig through Young Wizards and the new Dresden Files book (that hopefully comes out soon) and hope that the English version of books will be made available.

Or I'll just create a faked US account.

You can, or at least my wife can, switch to the US Kindle store and shop there as well on an EU account.

I love Amazon. But as a Swiss citizen it has quite a few shortcomings, although many of them are not Amazon's fault.

They don't deliver Hardware over the German border (there's no "Swiss" Amazon, we have to use the German one) and a lot of products are not available in Europe. But both of these things are more of a regulation thing than anything else.

What does annoy me though is the fact that not all English books are available for my Kindle. I wanted to start the Thrawn series from the Star Wars EU but could only find the German version in the German Amazon, despite there also being an English version in the US shop.So I'll have to dig through Young Wizards and the new Dresden Files book (that hopefully comes out soon) and hope that the English version of books will be made available.

Or I'll just create a faked US account.

Is native Swiss sites/shops expensive? I only use the marketplace (usually co.uk or .de, I live in Sweden), Amazon themselves are usually pretty expensive. At least on the stuff I want, and I often find cheaper stores in Sweden anyway. I don't like how shipping costs works with the marketplace though, it's like £5 per book (if it is a book which it usually is) even if you buy the books from the same place.

I'm not too impressed with social networking (not that it is inherently bad, but I think it caters to the multitude of vapid, consumerist, and self-absorbed people that compose modern society), but SpaceX is a tremendous success story in terms of science and business and the part of me that wants my children to live out Isaac Asimov stories.

Is native Swiss sites/shops expensive? I only use the marketplace (usually co.uk or .de, I live in Sweden), Amazon themselves are usually pretty expensive. At least on the stuff I want, and I often find cheaper stores in Sweden anyway. I don't like how shipping costs works with the marketplace though, it's like £5 per book (if it is a book which it usually is) even if you buy the books from the same place.

Most of the time Amazon is slightly cheaper or equal, and takes about the same time to deliver. But it has a considerably larger selection than any single local shop. And the convenience of not having to order things from three different shops is a major point for me.

I like Amazon.Think twitter is a waste of time.Space X is still government funded.

IMO NASA is where it is because of the "we had a problem and how do we never ever let that happen again" idea. Sure the idea is laudable, but makes the possibility of getting anything done efficiently impossible. This just allows private companies balance the cost vs risk more. Not that they will be cheaper under the same parameters but they can operate under different parameters.

Government isn't the only one that operates under the "we had a problem and how do we never ever let that happen again" moto. As politicians don't get into trouble unless something goes wrong, many large companies operate under this MO, everyone makes like they are doing something but nothing out of the normal and everyone keeps their jobs. This is not good and is something that needs to be carefully managed in both corporations and government. Someone needs to look at the larger picture, get to the bottom of things and sort out what is reasonable and not what is possible so it never happens again.

I bought a 9' x 9' shed on Amazon two years back (free shipping!), I also bought some parts for my bike last week that arrived in less than 24 hours from the time I placed my order.

Amazon has innovated in quite a few areas. However, even if we just look at the "dry goods" business. What they offer, how they structure the buying process and how they deliver it is fundamentally different then the old catalog business.

It's like discounting how smartphones fundamentally changed our lives due to the fact that land-lines have existed for decades.

I truly think that you guys that are dumping on Twitter are still thinking of it in the old "hey, look at this sandwich I just made" model. It was that shallow, years ago. And it's not like it can't still be, like any tool it's what you make of it. But I have a very focused follow list (around 50) where I not only keep tabs on some close friends and their jokes etc, but also some real luminaries in various fields. From just glancing at my stream I really keep up with a lot of information quickly, in the sense that you get a snapshot of what's really bubbling up.

For example, I follow our old political policy writer Julian Sanchez (https://twitter.com/normative/) and he's a machine. Breaking news on privacy issues? He's got 5 tweets explaining what's up and linking up the relevant stories.

I enjoy the real time opinions during tech events (WWDC and E3 just this week for instance). I also read the letters to the editor and story comments, I enjoy sampling people's opinions, that might not do it for you. I'm not saying it's for everyone. I do think though that hating on Twitter misses out on the real relevance it has now.

I truly think that you guys that are dumping on Twitter are still thinking of it in the old "hey, look at this sandwich I just made" model. It was that shallow, years ago. And it's not like it can't still be, like any tool it's what you make of it. But I have a very focused follow list (around 50) where I not only keep tabs on some close friends and their jokes etc, but also some real luminaries in various fields. From just glancing at my stream I really keep up with a lot of information quickly, in the sense that you get a snapshot of what's really bubbling up.

For example, I follow our old political policy writer Julian Sanchez (https://twitter.com/normative/) and he's a machine. Breaking news on privacy issues? He's got 5 tweets explaining what's up and linking up the relevant stories.

I enjoy the real time opinions during tech events (WWDC and E3 just this week for instance). I also read the letters to the editor and story comments, I enjoy sampling people's opinions, that might not do it for you. I'm not saying it's for everyone. I do think though that hating on Twitter misses out on the real relevance it has now.

I'm not saying it doesn't have a place. For information about late breaking things, for journalism it can be an absolute necessity. For ordinary people, I find it a time waster with little redeeming value. Hard to find depth in the populist nature of it. I always respect your opinion though.

NASA's problem is political meddling. Washington doen't care about space exploration, they only care about jobs in the correct states/districts. The result is the Marshall Space Flight Center, which has repeatedly failed to develop a Shuttle replacement since the late 1980s and yet continues to receive increasingly large percentages of the total NASA budget. Why? Because it's in Alabama.

When NASA reviewed the industry proposals for the boosters to be used for the Space Shuttle, they selected AeroJet's bid to produce giant one-piece boosters in Florida and tow them by barge to Cape Canaveral. The Nixon admin "encouraged" NASA to reconsider the bid from Morton Thiokol, the company that produces the rocket motors for U.S. nuclear ICBMs. So that's why the boosters were produced in Utah and transported across the country by rail in four segments to be assembled at Cape Canaveral using O-rings. Those O-rings would later become infamous.

Recently, NASA realized that the budget cutbacks would leave them unable to actually purchase the commercial crew transport services which SpaceX, Boeing, and SNC were developing with the help of partial funding from NASA. Faced with the prospect of developing spacecraft that NASA won't be able to buy, Boeing is threatening to quit the commercial crew program, and it's hard to blame them.

With all the patronage and uncertainty caused by beltway politics, it's virtually impossible for NASA to manage an efficient space program let alone pursue a long-term development roadmap. SpaceX has the luxury, under the leadership of billionaire technologist Elon Musk, to insulate themselves from the politicians and the financial analysts and work their long-term development plan step by step.

The United States is unique among the advanced industrial nations of the world for having essentially no industrial policy, and the worst part is that our government is structurally incapable of developing any coherent industrial policy even if they all agreed to try. NASA is Exhibit A.

NASA's problem is political meddling. Washington doen't care about space exploration, they only care about jobs in the correct states/districts. The result is the Marshall Space Flight Center, which has repeatedly failed to develop a Shuttle replacement since the late 1980s and yet continues to receive increasingly large percentages of the total NASA budget. Why? Because it's in Alabama.

When NASA reviewed the industry proposals for the boosters to be used for the Space Shuttle, they selected AeroJet's bid to produce giant one-piece boosters in Florida and tow them by barge to Cape Canaveral. The Nixon admin "encouraged" NASA to reconsider the bid from Morton Thiokol, the company that produces the rocket motors for U.S. nuclear ICBMs. So that's why the boosters were produced in Utah and transported across the country by rail in four segments to be assembled at Cape Canaveral using O-rings. Those O-rings would later become infamous.

Recently, NASA realized that the budget cutbacks would leave them unable to actually purchase the commercial crew transport services which SpaceX, Boeing, and SNC were developing with the help of partial funding from NASA. Faced with the prospect of developing spacecraft that NASA won't be able to buy, Boeing is threatening to quit the commercial crew program, and it's hard to blame them.

With all the patronage and uncertainty caused by beltway politics, it's virtually impossible for NASA to manage an efficient space program let alone pursue a long-term development roadmap. SpaceX has the luxury, under the leadership of billionaire technologist Elon Musk, to insulate themselves from the politicians and the financial analysts and work their long-term development plan step by step.

The United States is unique among the advanced industrial nations of the world for having essentially no industrial policy, and the worst part is that our government is structurally incapable of developing any coherent industrial policy even if they all agreed to try. NASA is Exhibit A.

100% agree. How do we remove much of the sticky fingers of the politicians? How do we let the operations breathe? Spin them off into non-profit companies competing? Or just for profit competing as now.

I know I'm old and all that but what's so new about what Amazon does except it uses webpages? My mother was ordering from catalogs decades ago and stuff showed up at home then too regardless of weight or size AND you could send it back.

A few people have mentioned it in passing, but I think there's something very important to call out about Amazon's retail operation. While the catalog model has been around for ages, and is still basically the same in modern e-tail, what Amazon did that was different was to make it as (or nearly as) convenient as shopping at a B&M.

It used to be, and still is to some degree, that you would shop primarily at your local B&Ms and supplement your shopping with catalog/online shopping for those items you couldn't find locally. With the product selection Amazon has, whether self-supplied or through its marketplace, and with the Prime program, they're beginning to make B&Ms become irrelevant. That's scary to think about if you're a traditional retailer. Not only do you have to compete with your local competition, but now you have to compete with Amazon and increasingly, it doesn't matter what line of retail you're in. Best Buy, Macy's, and Kroger all share the same competitor now, and that competitor can kick their ass. It's scary and it's really making those of us that work in the business take a good, hard look at ourselves, evaluate our business models, and make the necessary changes to keep up.

Sorry, Tijger, I didn't mean to quote you again, but your statement was thought-provoking.

I've only been reading Ars for the last 3-4 years, but its certainly my leading reliable source of tech news and stories. I don't think there's been a single period where I haven't made the effort to check whats new on Ars that day, and almost everything is at least interesting (even if it might not be wholly relevant to those of us in the third world ).

Thanks to all of you for making the last hour of work go by that little bit faster, 'grats on the 15 years.

I truly think that you guys that are dumping on Twitter are still thinking of it in the old "hey, look at this sandwich I just made" model. It was that shallow, years ago. And it's not like it can't still be, like any tool it's what you make of it. But I have a very focused follow list (around 50) where I not only keep tabs on some close friends and their jokes etc, but also some real luminaries in various fields. From just glancing at my stream I really keep up with a lot of information quickly, in the sense that you get a snapshot of what's really bubbling up.

For example, I follow our old political policy writer Julian Sanchez (https://twitter.com/normative/) and he's a machine. Breaking news on privacy issues? He's got 5 tweets explaining what's up and linking up the relevant stories.

I enjoy the real time opinions during tech events (WWDC and E3 just this week for instance). I also read the letters to the editor and story comments, I enjoy sampling people's opinions, that might not do it for you. I'm not saying it's for everyone. I do think though that hating on Twitter misses out on the real relevance it has now.

For the sake of discourse I pulled up Sanchez's tweets and I still feel that many of them feel like disconnected fragments of a conversation that's difficult to parse (even using the View Conversation link). There are links to articles, yes, but how is this stream better than getting those links from the news, blogs, etc?

Most of what you are saying reads to me as reasons why journalists and bloggers love Twitter. E.g. real time opinions during tech events. I don't care about real time opinions. I want a coherent account after the event is over. A blogger does want real time opinions because they need to write that coherent account for me to read, and they need to do so fast. I recognize that utility for a certain class of people. I criticize the desire of that class of people to continue to proselytize Twitter in order to generate the data they want to use.